The Big Picture - Making ‘Midsommar,’ A Deep Dive Into the Movie Freakout of the Year | Interview

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

Chris Ryan joins to discuss ‘Midsommar,’ Ari Aster’s shocking Swedish nightmare follow up to his debut horror hit ‘Hereditary’ (1:00). Then, Aster comes by to talk about the challenges of making a horror film set exclusively in the daylight, the pressure of following ‘Hereditary,’ and what he’s doing next (14:47). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan and Ari Aster Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. This week on TheRinger.com, our staff is ranking the 100 best moments in culture so far in 2019. This includes everything that happened in film, TV, celebrity news, memedom, and more. Cracking the top 100 so far are J-Lo and A-Rod's engagement, the rise of Lizzo, and the Cliff wife phenomenon. Also, be sure to listen and subscribe to Ringer Dish, our new celebrity podcast, and catch the latest episode covering their favorite moments from this year in pop culture. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer,

and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Swedish folklore and deeply depraved films. I'm joined today by Chris Ryan. Hello, Chris. What's up, man? Chris, you're here because you and I saw the movie Midsommar together. Later in the show, I'll have a conversation with the writer-director of Midsommar, Ari Aster. You may know him from his also deeply depraved film, Hereditary. He is back to make us very upset and excited. And I got to tell you, I was really quite impressed and kind of blown

away by Midsommar. What did you make of the movie? Not what I expected. Very, very sly and funny in a weird way. And one of those, like, going to have to just get my feet back underneath of me after it's over endings. So ultimately kind of blown away by it, but I just think that it's not going to be what people are expecting going into it. Yeah. You know, the movie is essentially about a couple and a few friends who take a trip to Sweden to essentially study the anthropological history of a Swedish commune that may or may not be a cult. Yeah, a friend of theirs that they meet at college, I think in grad school, takes them back to his small village in Sweden.

And this is sort of the setting for a couple that has had some problems, and a young woman who has experienced incredible loss. And it's a staggering portrait of relationships coming apart and simultaneously a very, very dark and effective, but brightly lit horror nightmare unraveling. I've been saying that this movie is literally like a nightmare to me in that it is very clear what is happening and feels very real, but the events that take place are monstrous and really discomforting. And Aster has just got this extraordinary sense of pacing where he just very slowly turns the dial. It's not jump

scares. It's not grotesquery. It's not blood pouring from someone's eyes necessarily. He does have some moments of genuine physical grossness, for lack of a better word. But he's just got his hand on the tension trigger in such an amazing way. What did you make of Hereditary? And how do you compare the two? Well, I think that Hereditary had some, if not quite explicitly, supernatural or mythological elements to it. Obviously, Paimon and the idea of basically Satan being reborn on Earth is something that's been brought up in in horror movies before it seemed almost as if hereditary was two separate movies in some ways though there was the the family tragedy and the family drama and then some of the more like biblical pagan elements to it uh Midsommar seems to me more like a complete

sentence and a complete cohesive work and at the same time i think that there will be people who love hereditary who don't quite get midsommar one thing that i think is really interesting to talk about we talked about this a bit when we were doing um the sort of state of horror when you when you had gary dobberman on your pod um is this idea of basically trojan horsing other things in while under the banner of a horror movie. And you could make the argument that that's what's happening in Midsommar. So I think that it's really interesting that Ari has essentially given us the classic horror movie setup. Like a Scooby-Doo gang goes off on an adventure and terrible shit happens. But what

he's really interested in is anthropology. He's interested in documentation of ritual. And I have no idea like what his research was and how close this is to actual pagan rituals that take place in rural Sweden or not. We will find out when we talk to him. Yeah, but that is his primary interest in this movie because the two,

really like the human element of this movie takes place in the first 30 minutes and the last 45 minutes. And everything in between is like every single detail, every single meal, every single question you could have about how this commune works gets answered in a really precise and methodical way. Yeah. That was one of the first things you said when you walked out. You said, this is more procedural than I expected it to be. And there's an extraordinary attention to detail, the production design, the sort of architectural design of the movie, every little drawing, pretty incredible. I don't really know what kind of a budget he was working with,

but it's interesting. You know, the movie was originally conceived, I think, and sold as basically a slasher movie set in Sweden. That was the original pitch. And I think that the relationship drama aspect of it came a bit afterwards. And you can see it's suffusing the story with a whole lot of deeper meaning. The woman at the center of the movie is Florence Pugh. I believe you were a bit of a Florence Pugh stan, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, she's in Little Drama Girl. I think she gives one of the best performances of last year. Yeah, she's an extraordinary young actor. I saw think she gives like one of the best performances of last year. Yeah, she's an extraordinary young actor.

I saw her in a movie called Lady Macbeth. Have you seen that film? I haven't. Very, very, very good movie. And she'll also be starring later this year in Little Women, which is Greta Gerwig's adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott book. Probably your favorite book of all time, right? Little Women.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I have a couple of different copies. Yeah. I think Little Women to a Certain Generation of Men was also sort of a horror movie. What else did you take away from... What, are we doing spoilers? Let's try to keep them at a minimum.

Okay, so what I will say is that the real horror of this movie is it's opening 30 minutes. Yes. And that one of the really ingenious things, and really, I don't know, ingenious, but also like gut punch things that Ari Aster does, is he presents us with the worst conceivable thing that could happen. And I put an emphasis on the word conceivable, because I think that anybody who worries about their parents or worries about their family,

is terrified of the idea of getting a call in the middle of the night. And this is, this kind of feasts on that very modern fear because we're so connected to people. We can email, we can text, we can call. That level of correspondence then has like a knock-on effect of like then needing that kind of contact to be sustained. And if something drops off, the level of anxiety it can produce is very specific and modern and very, very debilitating. And that's how he basically sets this world up. That's the tone he starts the movie with.

And because of that, nothing ever seems right for the rest of it. So there's never, usually what happens with these kind of like adventure horror movies is it seems so cool in the beginning. You never, ever, ever think that like this village and this, this adventure is going to work out right. You know? Yeah. You said last week on the show that you love a horror movie that starts out with like a bunch of kids going on a camping trip. And invariably when you have a movie like that, there's just a good vibe

and a lot of pop music playing on the soundtrack and everybody's smiling. Maybe there's a sex scene, you know, everybody's drinking around a campfire. This movie just opens with pain and it closes with pain. And everything that happens in the middle is very interesting because there was a moment, and I don't know if this struck you as well, where about halfway through the film,

I had the feeling like maybe this commune is kind of onto something. Maybe they have chosen a way to live that is more civilized and more spiritually connected to the world. Sure. And maybe even more decent. And that's a great trick to pull. And ultimately, I don't really know if Ari thinks that could possibly be true or if in

fact, and you know that our modern world is disgusting and is obsessed with technology and is obsessed with a kind of ritual that we accept as normal now, but is in fact also kind of broken and evil in its own way. I will say the movie predictably gets quite intense and scary. Yeah, the verdict comes down against the commune.

Yeah, yeah. Well, they make some choices that things, you may not be surprised to learn that it gets a bit crazy. But he has a fascinating thing that you're alluding to, which is essentially he sends this group of kids from america over there and for most of the movies the kids from america are dick bags you know like they're they're competitive ambitious greedy self-serving selfish can't be in the moment just want to get as fucked up as

possible while they're there shout out to will polter one of the all-time like dicks working in hollywood right now he's the penultimate yeah and so it speaks to also the genius of this movie and the real like the thing that's gonna really like make it last with people in their minds is i've never seen anything like this i've never seen this place i've never seen a horror movie that takes place entirely in the daytime. The long runtime, it's about two and a half hours, winds up having the knock-on effect for the viewer that it's having for the characters, which is you just start to get disoriented when you're staring into the daylight that long like that, especially in a dark theater. Like, please go see this in a theater, not for widescreen purposes, but it's almost hallucinogenic after a while. Yeah, I think if you watched it in the daytime in your home where there's sun coming in,

it just wouldn't work as well. That's a really good point. And yes, the time that elapses is also meaningful. You tend to slip into the psychedelic haze that a lot of these characters are slipping into. And since it takes place in Sweden, the reason it's so bright out is because of, you know, the cycles of sunlight. And in the summertime, as you know, Chris, I'm going to Sweden in a few weeks. That's the first thing I said to you when we walked out of the theater. I was like, cool vacation. Yeah, so I'm a little bit concerned about my journey. Have you talked to your wife about this?

I'm debating whether or not to drag her to see the movie again. Because she hasn't seen it and I'm actually quite desperate to see it again because there's so many little design characteristics that I'm interested to see again. It'll be a great,

like now that I know what happens, let's see all the different like things that happen. Exactly. I would kind of rewatch the trailer like 10 or 12 times just to get back to some of that visual stuff

that I really loved. But I do worry that if I bring her to the movie, we're not going to Sweden and I would like to go so but she doesn't know that I've booked a week-long stay with a commune that has some I think some exciting practices that I'm excited for us to explore I'm gonna be standing there in a robe being like have this tea had you had any exposure to the music of the Hacks and Cloak do you know what that is is? I do. I do. And that is,

it's up there with like Johnny Greenwood in terms of how impactful it is on your psychology while watching the movie. One of the great horror scores I can remember, honestly. It's a really,

really upsetting, slow-burning score by a man named Bobby Krillick who records as The Hacks and Cloak. I'm eager to talk to Ari about the choice for him because he worked

with Colin Stetson on The Hereditary Score. And he seems to talk to Ari about the choice for him because he worked with Colin Stetson on the Hereditary score and he seems to have this interesting taste for the sort of pitchfork approved ambient dread scoremeister.

Yeah. It's a very clever choice. What else did you admire about Midsommar? The architecture of the village is laid out. So they go to this village

obviously that's not really giving anything away. But typically with movies you don't really get something that where you can and the production built for the movie, they set it up so that when someone runs out of one barn and goes across the field, you can see the work that goes into getting across a field. And even as these days go on and it's the hottest summer on record for them,

you can kind of get that feeling of Florence like Florence Pugh's like taking a nap in the afternoon and that the drowsiness that comes with being really hot in the summer and she's like stuck in this arid barn with the doors open but you know when she walks out she's like completely disoriented and so that that feeling of both the weather and also like they're kind of constantly on psychedelics in this movie and what that must do to their perception anyway, despite the fact that what they're perceiving is actually happening. I thought it was really, really good mix. Yeah, I agree. There's something very clear about the layout of the entire setting. Yeah. You don't usually get that. Don't go there. This is okay.

We eat here. You sleep there. There's also a lot of very clever tricks in the exposition of the movie. Usually with movies like this where you have to unpack mythology, you inevitably get long stretches where an old man tells you why we do things. And in this movie, they do a little bit of that,

but then there is this natural story design where these kids are essentially seeking out a thesis to go back to bring back to school about anthropology. And so they have to just ask a lot of questions. They have to be curious about why certain things are taking notes. They're taking pictures. They're asking. Yeah. Yeah. And it reveals the world in a way that doesn't feel hacky. It's just sort of brilliantly designed. Any, any last sentiments

without spoiling anything? I will just be fascinated to see if this catches on as a phenomenon like hereditary. I think that it's very obvious that they're hoping it is. You know, there is a lot of meme material in this movie. There's a lot of like, holy shit, we'll be talking about the last hour of this movie

for months and months and months. But it is so demented. And I know that that's weird to say in comparison to Hereditary. But this movie is really, really messed up. It makes you feel some really strange things. And it also, like Hereditary, taps into the horror of grief in a way that I don't know if it's going to make people particularly comfortable. So it's going to be

really interesting to see how people deal with it. Honestly, I love this movie. I would not blame people for walking out after the first 35 minutes if it's too much. I agree. I think when you've got something as artfully made and as considered and wonderfully crafted as this, it's a little dumb to say, I'm curious what the cinema score is, but I'm curious what the cinema score is going to be because there's going to be a lot of people who just can't hang with something like this. And the movie has been so well marketed. The posters are so good. It's a young, cool cast. The sort of narrative around it. It's a breakup movie, but it's a horror movie. That's a clever conceit. People will be naturally interested in that.

And I do think if you're in a rock-solid relationship, it's a great movie to see. If you're not in a rock-solid relationship, maybe reconsider seeing it. Or if you're going to Sweden. Good point. Chris, thanks for chatting about Midsommar. Now let's go to my conversation

with the writer and director of this great film, Ari Aster. Delighted to be rejoined by Ari Aster, director of Midsommar and Hereditary. Ari, what's up? Hey, thanks for having me back. Yeah, thanks for being back. Thanks for making another film. I was fascinated to know what you were going to do next when you were here. Was it last spring when you were here? No, it would have been... Summer? July? Or maybe it was spring. Was it just before the release or was it... I think it was just before the release.? No, it would have been... Summer? July? Or maybe it was spring.

Was it just before the release or was it... I think it was just before the release. So yeah, it would have been summer. It would have been the beginning of June. So take me back to that moment. Where were you with the making of this movie at that time? The last two and a half years are like a blur. Hereditary came out June 8th.

I was in Hungary in pre-production on June 9th for Midsommar. And before that, as I was finishing Hereditary, as I was working on VFX and music and sound design, I was also working on the shot list for Midsommar so that I could go scouting to find locations because we needed to find a field on which we could build the whole village from scratch. We needed to find that field before Hereditary came out and I was thrown into press. So I had finished my shot list and I had

scouted locations for about two months while finishing Hereditary before Hereditary came out. And then immediately upon Hereditary's release, I was in prep for Midsommar. And then we shot the first week of August. That's when we began production. So in some ways, this feels like an alternate universe version of your first feature, where it's sort of incredibly bright. It's in a foreign country. It's a, it's a young cast instead of an older cast.

And it's obviously you've talked about how it's a breakup story instead of a family drama. Did you have a very clear sense of how you were going to make a movie like this? Or do you, do you have like a level of anxiety going into number two, especially given that there was so much positive reception around hereditary, even before it did good business at Sundance and at other festivals people there's a lot of coronation talk about you know master of horror and all this stuff were you more confident going into the making of Midsommar um well I was sort of spared the reception of hereditary if that's the right word i i i didn't really get to experience it because i was thrown immediately into this new project and we didn't have enough

time uh but we had to shoot in in the summer so it was a really really really tight pre-production period um that we just needed to make work so So I wasn't able to think about strategy or what my next project would be because it was already moving. So I wasn't able to get caught up in expectations or anything really. I don't know if I would say that I was more confident only because the circumstances were in some ways even more compromised. So I was maybe more nervous than I was on hereditary because the scale was larger, but you know, the budget wasn't that much larger. Um, uh, and, uh, we were really just like from minute one, we were really racing.

Um, so it kind of felt like I was like felt like the water was up to my nose through this whole thing, even up to me finishing a week ago. We finished the film less than a week ago. I think I saw you post a photo on Instagram in the editing bay trying to crunch against the last minute of finishing it. What was it that took so long? Is it because there was so much design or there just wasn't enough time you know i feel like there are so many specific small elements that go into a film like this the score and the sort of the visual there's a haze around some of the shots in this film that you can't get authentically like how much of that stuff is taking up your time in the end or was it just because there are a series of things you've not done before? Well, there's a different answer for every

phase of making the film. So in pre-production, we had, like I said, two months to build this entire village. So that means we found a field whose grass was taller than I was, and so we had to cultivate the field. We had to build 10 houses from scratch. Some of them are three stories tall. We had to, like everything you see in the film was built from scratch. None of that was there. We had to pave the path through the woods that leads to Horga, and so we did not have any time for that.

So that was just, you know, a sprint from minute one. And then once you're in production, the task becomes just like getting everything in the can. And, you know, we only had, you know, we, our schedule was, you know, was nice and comfortable except for the fact that we were shooting in the sun. I probably shouldn't say it was comfortable because it really wasn't actually. But we were shooting in the sun, chasing the sun, chasing continuity. You're beholden to the weather.

Was it August when you were shooting? It was August, yeah. August until early October. Is Hungary like Sweden in that there are extremely long days so you have an enormous amount of sun? No. So that was another compromise we had to make. The question was, do you shoot in Sweden where it's much more expensive

and you can stretch the dollar only so far when we knew that we needed to build this thing from scratch and we never would have been able to with the budget we had so we went to Hungary where the days are shorter it's definitely

a different industry over there there is an infrastructure there but it's very different from the way it is here, especially if you're making an independent film and you can't really bring your team from America. You are really working with a Hungarian crew, which ultimately was really great, but the learning curve is pretty intense because most of your crew doesn't speak English. Um, and then at the same time, uh, you, you know, we, we, we, we had a certain amount of days to, to, to do everything, but we, but they're not full days because we can

only begin when the sun is up and we were done when the sun is coming down. And it was hard to ever get started, you know, before like, you know, uh, three hours in. So in so anyway that that was a challenge um and then uh especially when you're doing these scenes that are so like heavily choreographed and and you're not kind of leaning on coverage and then in post-production it was really just uh we knew we wanted uh we wanted to release the film in the summer and and, and so it was, you know, we just, we, you know, we just accepted that and, and moved very quickly. I recall the original release date being August and then it got moved up. And at first I was like, this is great. It makes more sense earlier in the year, but also I did feel a bit bad for you because I heard that you were still working on it. Yeah. I would have been working up until August if I could have.

How many days did you guys actually shoot? We had 40 shooting days. That's more days than I had on Hereditary, except for the fact that on Hereditary we were shooting 12 hours a day and we could go further if we needed to. These days we were shooting French hours, which is 10 hours a day, no lunch. And that amounted to about seven hours of shooting every day. So cumulatively, we had less, we had less time to shoot this than Hereditary. I read you had a cut that was three hours and 45 minutes. Is that a fact? The first cut was, yeah, it was three hours and 45 minutes. Um, and then we, what happened to that cut?

Uh, we just kept working on it. We kept chiseling away and, you know, apologies to like the 12 people who would have seen that version. Um, I'm ready. When can you share it? Well, you know, we, we, we arrived at a cut around two hours and 45 minutes that I really liked. Um,

and you know, who knows there might be a director's cut at some point. Um, although I, I really am happy with what we landed at. Um, it, this feels like the tightest version we, we,

we, we could have, you know, ended up with. Um, and I'm, and I'm, I'm sure people will accuse me and will accuse me of still being indulgent.

Well, I have a million questions about both the style and design of the film and the themes of the film. Which one should we talk about first? Dealer's choice. Okay. So we'll talk about the style and design. You mentioned you have to build

all these edifices from scratch. You have to cultivate this field. There is an extraordinary level of illustrative and physical design in the movie and in this entire world that you're building inside of this commune slash cult. How much of that stuff was stuff you're pulling from reference material? How much of it is your own invention? How much of it is working with a production designer? Where does all of the visual representation, these geometric buildings, these illustrations that we see carved into walls, you know, the sort of choreography of some of the dance moves, all of those items, are they invention?

Are they born of something from a long time ago? Well, so we were drawing pretty liberally from a lot of different references. As I was writing the script, I was digging into Swedish tradition, Swedish folklore, German and English midsummer traditions. I revisited Fraser's The Golden Bough, which is kind of just this treasure trove of anthropological insight. And then I learned the runic alphabet, the Uthark as opposed to the Futhark. And then beyond that, there's a lot of invention happening where we're pulling from some things and then sort of repurposing them. And then a lot of the research I was doing was into different spiritual movements,

which I've been trying not to talk about only because I find them very beautiful. And, you know, we've obviously, like, taken certain liberties with them. Don't want to sell you them with podcast talk? Yeah, well, I don't want to sell you them with Midsommar. And so, yeah. So from there, I wrote the script, went out to Sweden, and went up to northern Sweden, Helsingland, and with my production designer, Henrik Svensson, who's a Swede,

we visited different Helsingagårds and different farms, some of which are centuries old. And a lot of those houses have murals on the walls. And so we were, especially for the art on the walls in this film, we were drawing from those as a reference. And then I was kind of dictating to different artists what was to be on the walls. There was a lot of prophetic imagery that, you know, is designed to kind of exist peripherally in the film but if you do choose to like you know investigate what's on the walls you'll see that there's a lot there's a lot of stuff that you know kind of ties into

what happens later in the film you know different they have different thematic resonances and then uh for the opening mural which kind of uh inaugurates the film I commissioned a contemporary artist named Mu Pan, whose work I really love, to kind of give us this big painting that presents us with the trajectory of the film. And it serves as sort of an overture. There's a real curatorial aspect to the movie where you can you want i love after i see a movie and i want to know all of the artisans that contributed to the thing i want to understand who shot it i want to understand who did the score i want to understand who did the production design not every movie does that you know some movies are popular entertainments and you're just like

wow that was fun and there's plenty of sort of more elegant art house films that also you just sort of you see the film like that was nice. And then you walk out and you don't really have a second thought. This movie has all of these recombinant parts. And you mentioned you working with a Hungarian crew. Did you work with a lot of the same people that worked on Hereditary? And how did you build your team essentially to make this movie? Well, Pavel Pogorzelski my my cinematographer uh i've been working with him

since uh since grad school uh we went to afi together and he's one of my best friends um so so so he was returning uh i was working with my producer lars knudsen who was also on on hereditary um henrik svenson uh the production designer this was the first time I worked with him. Um, Ana Vinuk, uh, was the choreographer for the dancing and, and,

uh, she, she, I, I couldn't have done this without her. She was amazing. Do all these people have Scandinavian bearing? They all have sort of,

well, Ana Vinuk does. Yeah. She's Swedish. Um, Lars Knudsen. I mean, Lars Knudsen, he's Danish.

Danish. Okay. and then, uh, let's see, uh, Bobby Krillick, who is also known as the Hexen Cloak, scored the film. This was my first time working with him, and it was a really incredible experience working with him. Incredible score. Yeah, he's amazing.

And I actually wrote the script to his music. I wrote this thing four years ago, and I was listening to his self-titled album as well as his second album, Excavation. And it really just kind of propelled me through the writing of the thing. And that's sort of how Hereditary happened. I worked with Colin Stetson on that film. He scored that film, and he's just an incredible guy

and an incredible artist. And I wrote Hereditary to his music. So I've been very fortunate to work with these musicians that I really, really admire and that have obviously been inspiring to me. You should challenge that streak. You should write your next film to the Rolling Stones. See if they'll write some songs for your next film. Get Keith Richards to... Yeah, why not? Maybe get him to star as well. The music is an interesting thing too because it doesn't totally set the scene in

the way that I had expected. And I think that the movie, there's a lot of energy around the movie, especially given how people received hereditary, but it doesn't feel like a true blue horror for me. Um, it's, it certainly has some, some roots in the kind of pagan horror movies of the seventies. And I'm sure that you're being asked about those movies a lot in these weeks. But was there ever a time when you wanted to say like, this isn't what you think it is?

Or do you worry that that will somehow corrupt the brand that is building around you? No, I mean, this is... So the way I've described this film from the beginning is, I see this as a fairy tale, like a macabre fairy tale. And I do think the film is, if anything, it's adjacent to horror. And I know that this is like, it's always controversial to like kind of disown horror, especially to horror fans. And I would say Hereditary was absolutely a horror film. I was proud of it. And that's what I was trying to do. This is harder for me to categorize. I guess it's not my job to categorize it. But for me, this was in every way a breakup movie at heart. And, you know, I, I'm somebody who really loves

melodrama. Um, the operative word being, you know, mellows, you know, like drama as music. And one tradition that I think is inherent to melodrama is you, you, you, you take the movie and you make it as big as the feelings that the characters are feeling. Um, and so it's like, you are, it's this, it's I guess tied to expressionism as well, where the external matches the internal. And so I really wanted to make this big operatic breakup movie that feels the way a breakup feels.

And it's as big as, it's like big and apocalyptic and, you know, a breakup, especially a very momentous one, if you're in a long-term relationship, feels like the world is ending. And so that's what I wanted to do here. And then the folk horror framework felt like the perfect structure for what i wanted to do um and uh and so one way of looking at it as well and this i guess if people haven't seen the film like maybe like you know close your ears but for the men in the film for the for most of the visitors except for our main character this is a folk horror movie but for our main character, this is a folk horror movie. But for our main character, for the protagonist, for Danny,

this film is a perverse wish fulfillment fantasy. And really what it's, and it is in every way a fairy tale. And so that was sort of the, I don't know, the gambit. It's funny, after a friend of mine and I saw the film, his first reaction to it was that all of the male characters are essentially experiencing your kind of classic, let's all go camping and then things go very badly for them sort of movie.

And the rest of the movie in some ways is obviously this very emotional tale of grieving and loss, but also a bit procedural in a way. There's a lot of excavation of how things work. And you've got this great kind of design around students seeking their thesis. And so they ask a lot of questions and then that kind of helps you do some exposition in some ways where nothing feels forced and everything feels very natural. Was it very purposeful to say, if we just have a bunch of curious students as the stars of our film, then we'll be able to more clearly communicate what's really happening inside of this community? Well, you know, I mean, first of all, for me, there's nothing like funnier than

like people competing over a thesis. know it also felt like the perfect way of keeping people there where the worse it gets the more exciting it becomes because because they've already kind of the light bulb has already gone off in their heads that that like you know they're gonna pop the lid off of this community um and so things get popped. Yeah. Things do get popped. There are a lot of pop lids in this movie. Yeah. So to speak,

hopefully in the audience too. Yeah. Um, and so that's all part of it. I, I do see the film as being kind of a dark comedy as well. I was, my next question was,

this movie is just really funny. And I don't know if that's going to be coming across in the first wave of press. people are going to be like, oh my God, it's so upsetting and psychedelic. And we were laughing a lot. I mean, I was laughing, especially through the final 30 minutes. I was like, this is incredible what the way this movie concludes. Is it important for you to understand, for everyone to kind of understand that kind of intention with a movie like this, which is very unusual for what most people will see when they go to the movie theater? No, I think if anything, it's almost better to not hear me saying that. I'm really hoping that it's something that people have to wrestle with. And I hope people come out feeling contradicting things. I mean, it's hard to speak about without spoiling anything. But it's a movie that I think is working towards this grand catharsis

and I'm hoping that in some ways it's about catharsis and I'm hoping that it is ways it's about catharsis and it, and it, it's a, you know, and I'm hoping that it is cathartic, but I, but I hope that it's a catharsis that people have to really contend with. And, and that maybe feels a little bit poisonous.

Has the movie changed a lot? Cause you mentioned you wrote it four years ago, but then you experienced the breakup much later than that, I presume. Yeah. Well, um, no, I, later than that, I presume. Well, no. So, I mean, so I was writing through the breakup.

Okay. So I wrote this four years ago. I had, you know, I was writing it while I was kind of going through the ruins of that relationship. But like I, but I had wanted to write a breakup movie before. I see. I just hadn't found a way in. And then, you know, and I was able to here. ruins of that relationship but like i but i i had wanted to write a breakup movie before i say um i just hadn't found a way in and then you know and i was able to hear um and i would say if anything i mean i i had more objectivity while while making the film i we also were thrown right into it so i wasn't able to like return to the script or really polish it much i kind of you know i i

tried to but um but really my director's hat was on like from minute one so i and i i find the act of writing and the act of directing to be like very different things and i kind of once i'm once i've entered the process of directing a film i i'm very, you know, nothing is sacrosanct in the script. How long was the script if you had a three-hour and 45-minute cut? Well, I don't know. I cheated with the margins a little bit. It was a little, I think.

Okay. This is a safe space. You can tell us. I think altogether it would have been about a 150 page script, but I, you know, I like to live in scenes and, and it's,

it's a, you know, I think it's a pretty atmospheric film. And so there are, there are certain two minute scenes that, you know, might've taken up a seventh of a page. Producers will have to know that from you going forward.

You'll be, you'll be languishing inside of your scenes if you can um and and and you mentioned uh that it's that it felt quite anthropological to you that the that it felt like you were being you know taken through the village and and the long the long cut of the movie is like uh a like a an unmerciful amount of that. I would love that. I mean, the slowly unfolding first dread and then terror is just so effective in the last act of the movie.

I wanted it to go on a lot longer. I'm interested in, well, I had coffee with a friend recently who works, who makes movies. And he just saw your film too and he was like that guy's amazing i'll bet he's got 12 scripts in his drawer and it's interesting that he chose this movie as his first movie after the breakout thing um one is that true that you have a lot of scripts in your drawer and they and two why did you choose this one to be the next thing to do?

He's close. I've written 11 scripts. Oh, that was almost on the money. Yeah, and not all of them I still want to make. A lot of them I wrote when I was much younger. But there are, I would say, six or seven of them that I still want to make, and then there are a few that I have ready to write that I haven't been able to write in the last two years that I'm excited to write.

And right now I'm debating between two that I want to make next. Um, you have not committed to anything. I've committed to, to choosing between these two. Okay. I, and I haven't quite, uh, come up with a verdict yet, but, um, with this one, that's an amazing like personality test, whatever film you choose next. I know. And they're both extremely weird. I expect nothing less. Yeah. One is like a comedy and one is like a deranged melodrama, like family melodrama.

And so I'm choosing now. But, you know, it's funny. I really had this, I just felt like I had this character's trajectory, like, ready to go. Like, I wanted to take this character played by Florence Pugh, Dani, I wanted to take her from A to B. And I just, like, I felt like I was just ready to do it right away and there was a feeling of just you know like let's not think about it let's not like get strategic about what to do next let's like just go and so there was something really liberating about that

because especially with how intense the process of making the film was because we were just thrown right into it and there was no time to get neurotic about it and overthink anything. If anything, we didn't even have the opportunity to dig as deep as I probably would have liked to, which I think honestly is so much better for the film. What did you see in Florence that made you want to make this with her? I saw her in Lady Macbeth.

I thought she was great. It's a great film. Yeah. Really like that director too, William Oldroyd. Really sweet guy. Great guy. I hope he makes something again soon. I don't know if he has something cooking.

I think he's making something right now. I'm excited to see whatever he does. But I saw her in that. I had been hearing nothing but great things. We were looking around, and a lot of women were taping for the part and sending in tapes, and there were a lot of people that we were considering and talking about. But Florence was the one person who couldn't tape

because she was doing Park Chan-wook's miniseries, The Little Drummer Girl. And so it was kind of, she was not struck off the list because she would be available to do the film, but she just couldn't read. And so we were talking about all these women, and there were a lot of people that we almost went with, these really great actresses. And we just noticed about all these women, and there were a lot of people that we almost went with, these really great actresses.

And we just noticed that we kept saying, well, we don't want to make a choice until we're sure that we can't get Flo to read. So who are we talking about here? Taylor Swift? Who else was on the list? Who else were you trying to draw on? It was just Taylor Swift.

Okay. That would be a different kind of movie. Yeah. I know. I wonder what if um but uh you'd probably upset more teenagers if it had been that movie yeah which is reason enough um but we uh uh but finally you know she she ended up taping and i talked to her and it and it just it it became clear like you, like it's got to be Florence. And, and yeah, she's just a really remarkable actress, really just like kind of amazing to watch her work. Is she a glutton for punishment? I feel like if you look at her first four or five

big projects, they're all like pretty challenging, pretty harrowing. Lady Macbeth, even the fighting with my family, the wrestling movie, she had to learn how to wrestle. Your film, any Park Chan-wook piece is going to be complicated and probably difficult. What do you think it is? She likes a challenge? I guess, yeah, I mean, she definitely likes a challenge. She's extremely confident and like, you know,

she's scarily confident and almost totally untrained, which is really crazy because she certainly strikes me as somebody who has, you know, like many years of training like in her back pocket. And she's just a total natural. Did you see her character as a surrogate for you when you were making the film? Yeah, well, when I was writing it, I was putting a lot of myself into that character. Did it turn out to be the person that you thought it should have been? Or did it change?

Well, Florence and I are very different. I get that impression. Like I said, she was very confident. I'm terrified by everything and life is just a trial to be, you know. Is life is just a trial to be you know is that still true i feel like you said this a year ago and i was like okay fine but i knew that hereditary was

going to do well it was very evident that you had hit upon something but now yeah i mean you're still scared of things and not confident if there was one major disappointment with Hereditary, it was that I learned that there's no changing me. You can change the circumstances of my life, but I will remain. Yeah, there's a lot of me in Dani. And I think anybody who knows Florence will see that she's a bit of a chameleon. I mean, there's a lot of Florence and Danny as well, but at the same time, they're very, very different. Yeah, really exciting to see her just shed her skin and do this.

What was the single hardest thing to shoot? At the risk of spoiling something, I suppose. Well, there's a, oh gosh. I mean. It seems like there's some complicated shots and set pieces here. Yeah, I mean, the whole thing was just trial by fire. It was so hot out there.

And I mean, again, just every day you're just chasing continuity. Shadows like, you know, through it in every scene are just you know changing did you have any references for a brightly lit horror film i was trying to think about this i couldn't really come up with one well we know there were no i mean there were no i mean the wicker man certainly is pretty brightly lit but um uh there were no but there's a lot of overcast in that film you know there's that no it's true it it's true. It's kind of a grim aesthetic.

I would say that our references tended to not be horror movies. I was talking a lot about Powell and Pressburger with my cinematographer. And when I was talking to my production designer you know i i had him watch uh sergey porajnov's um the color of pomegranates and shadows of forgotten ancestors um gosh what else um wizard of oz was definitely something we talked about uh and we talked more about that even more about that when we were actually in the DI coloring the film than when we were on set. Was it just like the red, yellow, green kind of over and over again? Yeah.

Well, especially at the end, like, you know, one of our main characters, his eyes are closed at one point and then they're reopened. And we're sort of, you know, in his perspective and when when the eyes are reopened we enter what i call the the crayola phase of the movie where the colors are just really garish and uh broad um and and we were definitely looking at at uh i mean different like mgm musicals you know from you know the 40s and 50s and yeah i mean color was like a big conversation on this movie you kind of abandoned expectations around hereditary by going to make another film immediately you're not doing that here so now what happens are you will you be closely tracking the box office will you be reading every review like what is your what do every review? How will you experience a movie

like this? Because it will inevitably be divisive. There will be a lot of regular folk who are going to walk into what they think is going to be just a scary movie in the middle of the summer, and they're going to meet something that is not dramatic and slightly deranged and incredibly beautiful, but different than what they're used to seeing. So how much are you, will you engage in kind of the discourse around this thing that you worked so hard on? Um, I mean, I'll probably try to disengage, but I, I mean, I'd love to say like, I don't read reviews and I, and I don't care, but I find myself reading reviews and caring. You're too smart and informed about movies to be a person who doesn't do that. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I'm also also somebody who loves film criticism and grew up just kind of devouring that stuff.

So I'll inevitably get caught up in that, I'm sure. But I am right now really thinking very hard about the next film. And I'm really excited about diving into it. And I think the hope is that we'll be shooting early next year. Um, again, like, you know, we haven't settled on what it'll, what it'll be. And, and, uh, I'm, I'm very grateful that I can even think that way because, you know, for 10 years after school, I was just struggling to get anything going. And that's, that's why I have so many of these scripts in my closet is because I was writing

while I was trying to get other things going and they weren't going. And there was one film that I thought I was going to make first that we almost got going three different times. And it almost got the green light and we just barely, it was a near miss every time. Has it dawned on you that it happened?

There are thousands of people who aspire to do what you're doing. It happened. I haven't processed it because, again, there's been no break between hereditary and this. In some ways, I know that my life has changed, and I haven't taken it in. I'm so grateful that it's happened. And it's surreal to be able to even talk about what I want to do next and feel as though I might have a hope of actually being able to control that material. I read about you on Deadline.com and I was like, wow, it really happened.

Ari can do whatever he wants now. It's incredible. Well, I don't know. Let's see. Push it. Challenge it. was that it actually made some money, which I wasn't really expecting. And so, yeah, I'm in kind of a very, very privileged position, and I'm really grateful to be here. And I just want to make interesting films and take it as far as I can. You know I end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they've seen. You probably see more films than I do.

You got a couple you want to recommend or shout out, old or new? Yeah, gosh. Well, at the Film Forum in New York, they were playing last year at marion bad um uh a restored uh dcp of that and that that was uh really amazing to return to never seen it on the big screen yeah um elaine renee is really really amazing i i was talking a lot about don't look now on um while I was kind of taking Hereditary around because that's a really important film to me and Nicholas Rogue is

really important to me. But I was reminded watching last year at Marion Bad, like how much of Rogue's aesthetic comes from what Rene was like pioneering in montage. Yeah, I don't know. I saw something new recently. Anything that made you jealous or that you thought, I don't know how they did that? That made me jealous. There were moments in The Souvenir that made me jealous. I thought that was pretty incredible.

Had you seen her other films before that? Yeah, I've been a Joanna Hogg fan for a long time. I really love Exhibition. I really love exhibition. I love unrelated. You guys have a, there's an underlying aesthetic going on, intellectual aesthetic that is like, most people have a hard time being together and they need to challenge one another

to see if they really belong together. I feel like there's something you guys share. Well, yeah, she's so austere. And I mean, I love the way that she shoots spaces in such an interesting way. I really feel like her films feel uniquely architectural. They kind of make me think about Antonioni. She doesn't move the camera, though. um, she doesn't move the camera though. Yeah.

She doesn't move the camera. No, it's so still, but it's, but it's the blocking like in these fixed shots that are so interesting and, and, uh, feel like these spaces feel so lived in and they,

and they take on like such a presence. I, I'm, I'm, I, yeah, I mean, I'm,

I'm, I'm pretty amazed by, by her. And, and I thought the souvenir was, I don't want to call it like a step forward because I love those, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty amazed by, by her. And, and I thought the souvenir was, I don't want to call it like a step forward because I love those films. Um, but it feels like an opening up of, of her aesthetic. I can't wait to see her next film.

That's exactly how I feel about Midsommar. All right. Thanks for being here, man. Thank you.